61–70 of 84 posts
CD-ROMs for both Windows 2000 Beta and Office 97 (for Alpha systems) came in our monthly TechNet subscription packages.
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When I last got the VMS nostalgia bite, I picked up a DS10, on account of the power and space advantages over the ES line, not having a garage and all. I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system. Solo VMS is a lonely experience.
> I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system. Same. I had VMS running on an AS200 next to a beautiful X terminal, just like the computer lab at school. But my dad wasn't sitting next to me, hunting and pecking away at his old C.Itoh terminal. None of the usual suspects were across the table, locked into their favorite MUDD. And so on. I miss them all so much.
I love OpenSimH and Termux.
Somehow, Windows 2000 does not look dated to me. It looks functional and usable, and maybe even somewhat fresh. I never actually used it long-term (during college, started using Linux), so it can't be nostalgic. Anyone else feel the same?
That said, it was mostly just an internet gateway/dhcp server. But gave me less issues than the Win 98 clients.
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The only thing better is server 2003.
Dave Cutler created and ran the Windows NT product line through Windows 2000. Other people ran Windows XP, but Cutler was still in charge of Server 2003 before moving on to special projects like creating 64 bit Windows and Microsoft Azure. His attitude towards the eradication of known bugs really led to Windows feeling rock solid, with the exception of driver bugs (being the leading cause of blue screens).
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the drawback for me was the startup time. it really seemed to hang out on the splash screen for quite a while (just as NT4 did, and ofc they were from the same core)
IIRC, Win2000 would wait for most/all services to complete startup before showing the login UI. XP would allow login as soon as enough of the system was started to support it. The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up. It's been 20+ years so it's possible I had it wrong then, or remember it wrong now.
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It really wasn't a bad operating system. In fact it kind of blew its (lame) Win9X predecessors out of the water! I ran on Win2000 for years before finally switching to Linux. Of course Microsoft ended up going a different course with its newer "offerings" and I have nothing but pity for those who still have to use their products on a day-to-day basis.
Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines. Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system. Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.
As I used to be big into UNIX in the early 2000's, I used to dual boot between it and Red-Hat, eventually I got fed up dual booting all the time depending on the project work, or client support, and ended up using Windows, alongside Humming Bird X Server to connect to our development servers (yep back when we were still time-sharing UNIX servers for coding tasks).
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Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines. Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system. Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.
> very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 I was one of them. I went from ME to 2k and it was definitely a big step up.
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It really wasn't a bad operating system. In fact it kind of blew its (lame) Win9X predecessors out of the water! I ran on Win2000 for years before finally switching to Linux. Of course Microsoft ended up going a different course with its newer "offerings" and I have nothing but pity for those who still have to use their products on a day-to-day basis.
> It really wasn't a bad operating system It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that hors…
XP contained a lot more than just theme changes. XP solved a lot of compatibility issues that Win2k still had at the time. Running 2000 applications on XP would be nearly guaranteed to work, but Microsoft needed to also get Windows Me/98/95 games and applications to run for consumers.
XP brought a few general improvements such as ClearType and the ability to revert driver updates (which Windows users are still unable to find these days, leading to the "I have to uninstall updates every week or my weird USB keyboard breaks" rants online).
Everything Windows 2000 did good, XP did as good or better. The biggest difference was the UI, but the "classic" theme stuck around until at least Windows 7.
Somehow, Windows 2000 does not look dated to me. It looks functional and usable, and maybe even somewhat fresh. I never actually used it long-term (during college, started using Linux), so it can't be nostalgic. Anyone else feel the same?
Windows 2000 really was the best desktop OS from release until 2002 at least. Linux was incomplete, Sun and SGI were dead except for servers, classic Mac OS was a crashy dinosaur, and Mac OS X was a slow mess. I bought 10.0 on release day and installed it on a dual core G4, almost the top Mac you could buy. It was not usable, much as I wanted to. (The real v1 was Mac OS X 10.2.) Windows 2000 was designed for real pro…